When Two Maps Meet

Attachment in Neurodiverse Relationships

Every relationship is, in some sense, a meeting of maps. Two people arrive, each carrying an internal working model built from their own accumulated relational experience, each shaped by their own developmental pathway, each expecting something from the other based on what the past has taught them to expect (Bowlby, 1982; Main et al., 1985; Waters & Waters, 2006). When those maps are compatible enough, when the expectations they generate are close enough to what the other person actually offers, the relationship has room to build something. When they are not, the gap between what each person expects and what the other person provides becomes the primary terrain of the relationship, often without either person understanding exactly why (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2016; Reis et al., 2004).

In neurodiverse relationships, where one person's development has followed the autistic pathway and the other's has followed the non-autistic pathway, the maps are built from genuinely different materials. Different in ways that matter and that neither person is likely to have been given the language to understand (Milton, 2012; Yew et al., 2023). The result is a particular kind of relational difficulty that is not about lack of love, not about character failure, and not about the essential nature of the two people involved. It is about two working models, built through two different developmental processes, meeting each other without adequate translation (Milton, 2012; Stafford et al., 2023).

That is what this post is about: what happens when those maps meet, what the meeting tends to produce, and what it takes to build something that works for both people.

Two Different Attachment Languages

The working model does not only shape what a person expects from relationships. It also shapes how they express attachment, how they signal the need for connection, comfort, or reassurance, and how they recognize those signals when someone else is sending them (Ainsworth et al., 1978; Bowlby, 1982; Main et al., 1985). In this sense, the working model is not just an internal map. It is also a language, a set of channels through which attachment bids are sent and received.

In neurodiverse relationships, the two partners are not speaking the same attachment language. This is not a metaphor. It is a neurological description of something real and consequential (Milton, 2012; Yew et al., 2023).

The non-autistic partner navigates closeness through what MacMillan terms body empathy: that immediate, embodied, largely automatic reception of social and emotional information from the faces, voices, and bodies of others, grounded in high levels of embodied simulation and interoceptive sensitivity and awareness. When the non-autistic person sends an attachment bid, it tends to travel through these channels. A shift in tone, a particular look, a change in body posture, a reaching out that carries meaning the sender expects to be felt rather than decoded. The non-autistic partner is not being obscure. They are communicating through the channels that have always worked for them, the channels through which other non-autistic people receive them fluently and without effort (Ainsworth et al., 1978; Bowlby, 1982; Reis et al., 2004).

The autistic partner is not receiving on those channels with the same fluency. The bid arrives, but not necessarily in a form the autistic nervous system automatically decodes. This is not indifference and it is not emotional absence. It is a mismatch between the frequency on which the signal is being broadcast and the frequency on which the receiver is naturally tuned (Jaswal & Akhtar, 2019; Milton, 2012). The bid may land as noise rather than signal, or may not register at all, while the autistic partner is genuinely present, genuinely engaged, and genuinely unaware that something was just sent (Bottema-Beutel et al., 2021; Sasson et al., 2017).

The same mismatch runs in the other direction. When the autistic partner sends an attachment bid, it may travel through channels the non-autistic partner does not recognize as bids: the offer of a shared activity rather than verbal intimacy, proximity without conversation, a practical gesture that carries emotional meaning the sender understands but the receiver may experience as practical rather than relational (Jaswal & Akhtar, 2019; Milton, 2012). The non-autistic partner, whose body empathy is continuously scanning for the social and emotional signals they are accustomed to reading, may not register what is being offered. They may experience the autistic partner as emotionally distant or unavailable, not because the autistic partner is absent but because the language of their presence is not being received (Bottema-Beutel et al., 2021; Sasson et al., 2017).

Both partners are reaching. Both partners are, in their own way, trying to connect. And both partners are finding, repeatedly, that the reaching does not quite land. That is the double empathy problem in its most intimate and most consequential form, and it does not resolve itself through goodwill alone (Milton, 2012; Stafford et al., 2023).

What the Mismatch Does Over Time

A single missed bid is not a crisis. Relationships absorb misattunement all the time. What the working model is built to handle is not perfection but reliability, not constant attunement but sufficient attunement, enough of the time, that the basic question of attachment can be answered: are you there, do you hear me, am I safe with you? (Ainsworth et al., 1978; Bowlby, 1982; Main et al., 1985).

When bids are consistently missed, not through malice but through the structural mismatch of two different attachment languages, the working model begins to update. It registers the missed bids as data. And over time, that data begins to shape what each partner expects from the relationship, what they reach for, and what they stop reaching for because reaching has not been producing results (Bowlby, 1982; Main et al., 1985; Waters & Waters, 2006).

For the non-autistic partner, the accumulated experience of missed bids tends to produce a particular kind of relational loneliness. Their attachment system is designed to run on mutual reflection, on the experience of being seen and having that seeing reflected back through the continuous back-and-forth of embodied social exchange (Ainsworth et al., 1978; Reis et al., 2004). When that reflection is not available in the primary relationship, the non-autistic partner may begin to lose their own sense of perspective. Due to Neurodiverse Relationship Dynamics™, a non-autistic person in a relationship where their bids for mutual reflection repeatedly go unmet can gradually loses themselves in the stronger gravitational field of their partner's perspective, accommodating more and more, asserting less and less, until the self that needed to be reflected has become very hard to locate.

For the autistic partner, the accumulated experience tends to produce something different and something that may be less visible to the autistic partner themselves. Research on long-term neurodiverse relationships consistently finds that autistic partners tend to rate the relationship as doing better than their non-autistic partners do (Strunz et al., 2017; Yew et al., 2023). This is not dishonesty. It reflects the different feedback mechanisms each developmental pathway runs on. The autistic partner, whose sense of relational security may be built more from the structure and reliable presence of the relationship than from its moment-to-moment emotional reciprocity, may genuinely experience the relationship as adequate while their non-autistic partner is in significant distress (Stafford et al., 2023; Strunz et al., 2017; Yew et al., 2023). The gap between those two experiences, unaddressed, tends to widen over time.

Underneath all of this, for both partners, the foundational question of attachment is still being asked. It is being asked in every unmet bid, every moment of reaching that does not land, every accommodation made in place of a conversation that hasn't happened yet. Both partners are asking whether this is still a safe place. Both partners deserve an answer that is actually responsive to the question they are asking (Bowlby, 1982; Reis et al., 2004; Reis & Gable, 2015).

The Working Models in the Room

When two partners come into conflict in a neurodiverse relationship, they are rarely only in conflict about the presenting issue. They are also, always, in conflict between their working models: the maps each person is using to interpret what the other person's behavior means, what it signals about safety and intention, and whether it confirms or contradicts what the working model has already learned to expect (Bowlby, 1982; Main et al., 1985; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2016).

A non-autistic partner whose working model carries anxious attachment may interpret autistic withdrawal during conflict as abandonment, even when the autistic partner is withdrawing in order to regulate, not to reject (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2016; Stafford et al., 2023). An autistic partner whose working model carries the specific wariness built from years of being misread may interpret a non-autistic partner's emotional pursuit during conflict as overwhelming or threatening, even when the non-autistic partner is pursuing because they need repair and reassurance (Milton, 2012; Sasson et al., 2017; Stafford et al., 2023). Both interpretations make sense from inside the map that is generating them. Neither interpretation is accurate to what is actually happening in the other person. And without the tools to understand what each person's working model is doing and why, the conflict tends to intensify rather than resolve, with each partner's response confirming the other's worst fears rather than addressing them (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2016; Parker & Mosley, 2021; Stafford et al., 2023).

This is not a counsel of despair. It is a description of a specific problem, and specific problems can be addressed when they are accurately named. The working model is not destiny. It is a map built from past experience, and maps can be redrawn when the territory turns out to be different from what they predicted (Bowlby, 1982; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2016; Waters & Waters, 2006).

Neurodiverse Parent and Child

Everything said about neurodiverse intimate partnerships applies, with different stakes and different power dynamics, to neurodiverse parent and child relationships.

When a non-autistic parent is raising an autistic child, the attachment language mismatch is present from infancy. The parent is scanning for the signals of connection, distress, and comfort-seeking that their own developmental pathway is primed to receive. The autistic child is sending signals in a different register (Cossette-Côté et al., 2022; Rutgers et al., 2004; Teague et al., 2017). The parent's love is not in question. What determines whether the attachment bond forms securely is the parent's capacity to learn to read this particular child's particular signals, to develop what researchers have called insightfulness, the ability to see through the behavior to what it is actually communicating, and to respond to that rather than to the behavior's surface appearance (Oppenheim et al., 2009).

When that translation is present, the autistic developmental pathway receives what it needs: clear, accurate, and calibrated feedback from the environment. The attachment bid is recognized for what it is, the response comes, and the working model begins to build in the direction of safety (Cossette-Côté et al., 2022; Oppenheim et al., 2009; Rutgers et al., 2004). When it is not present, the autistic child's working model builds from the experience of reaching and not being received, which is the experience that shapes so much of what follows (Bowlby, 1982; Main et al., 1985; Teague et al., 2017).

When a non-autistic child is raised by an autistic parent, the dynamic carries its own particular challenges. The autistic parent may be profoundly committed and deeply loving, and may be doing everything within their understanding to provide care (Libster et al., 2024; Thom-Jones et al., 2024). But the non-autistic child's attachment bids may travel through the body empathy channels that the autistic parent does not receive with full fluency, and the child may find that the specific kind of mutual emotional reflection their developmental pathway depends on is not consistently available. Over time that experience shapes the child's working model in ways that matter, not because the autistic parent has failed to love the child, but because the child's attachment language has not been fully received (Bowlby, 1982; Main et al., 1985; Thom-Jones et al., 2024).

Understanding this dynamic is not about assigning blame. It is about building support. Autistic parents can develop their own forms of attunement, calibrated to their particular child's needs, and can build holding environments that include other sources of the relational reflection their non-autistic child requires (Kegan, 1982; Libster et al., 2024; Thom-Jones et al., 2024). What makes the difference, as always, is not neurotype but understanding, and understanding can be built.

Translation, Not Transformation

The most important reframe the attachment framework offers to neurodiverse relationships is this: the goal is not transformation. It is translation (Milton, 2012; Stafford et al., 2023).

The non-autistic partner does not need the autistic partner to become a different kind of person or to learn to send bids through the body empathy channels that non-autistic nervous systems run on fluently. The autistic partner does not need to mask their way to relational acceptability or to perform emotional reciprocity that does not come naturally (Bradley et al., 2021; Cage & Troxell-Whitman, 2019; Pearson & Rose, 2021). What both partners need is enough understanding of each other's attachment language that the bids can be recognized for what they are and responses can be offered in forms the other person can actually receive (Parker & Mosley, 2021; Stafford et al., 2023; Yew et al., 2023).

This is concrete work. It means the non-autistic partner learning to recognize that a practical gesture, a shared activity, a particular kind of steady presence, may be the autistic partner's way of saying I am here, I am with you, you are safe with me. It means the autistic partner learning, through explicit rather than ambient feedback, that the non-autistic partner needs certain kinds of verbal acknowledgment and emotional reflection that do not come automatically to the autistic developmental pathway, and that providing them is not performance but care. It means both partners developing enough fluency in each other's attachment language that missed bids are named and repaired rather than silently accumulated into evidence that the relationship is not working (Parker & Mosley, 2021; Reis et al., 2004; Stafford et al., 2023).

Research on neurodiverse relationships supports this framing. Partner responsiveness, the experience of being genuinely heard and responded to, emerges consistently as one of the strongest predictors of relationship satisfaction, and it matters for both partners regardless of neurotype (Reis et al., 2004; Reis & Gable, 2015; Yew et al., 2023). The relational system is what determines whether attachment security is possible, not the neurotype of either individual within it (Cossette-Côté et al., 2022; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2016; Yew et al., 2023). When both partners feel accurately perceived and genuinely responded to, the working model on each side begins to update. New data points accumulate. The map, slowly and on good evidence, begins to revise itself toward safety (Bowlby, 1982; Reis et al., 2004; Waters & Waters, 2006).

What Honesty Makes Possible

Acknowledging this honestly may or may not sustain the relationship. For some neurodiverse couples, naming the structural gap clearly is what finally allows them to build something workable around it. For others, that same honesty is what makes clear that the gap is wider than the relationship can bridge, and that the most caring thing either person can do is to stop asking the relationship to be something it cannot be. Both outcomes are real, and the high rates of conflict, dissatisfaction, and divorce in neurodiverse partnerships reflect not a failure of love but the genuine difficulty of sustaining attachment security across a structural neurological difference that neither partner chose and that neither partner is equipped, without significant understanding and support, to navigate well (Stafford et al., 2023; Strunz et al., 2017; Yew et al., 2023).

What understanding makes possible is not necessarily the preservation of the relationship. It is the possibility of making clearer choices. The non-autistic partner who understands that their need for body empathy reciprocation is structural, and not a personal failing or an unreasonable demand, can assess honestly whether what the relationship provides is sufficient, and what supplementary sources of relational nourishment they need to build regardless of whether the partnership continues (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2016; Reis et al., 2004; Yew et al., 2023). The autistic partner who understands what their non-autistic partner's nervous system actually requires, rather than experiencing those needs as an indictment of their own adequacy, can engage with the reality of the relationship rather than a simplified version of it (Parker & Mosley, 2021; Stafford et al., 2023).

For couples who do choose to stay and build, the non-autistic partner needs sources of body empathy reciprocation outside the primary partnership, not as replacements for it but as necessary supplements to it. Friendships, communities, and other close relationships where the non-autistic developmental pathway is met by other non-autistic pathways provide what the primary relationship, by its nature, cannot fully provide. Building those sources deliberately, and understanding them as a structural requirement rather than a sign that the primary relationship is failing, is part of what allows neurodiverse relationships to remain viable over the long term (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2016; Reis et al., 2004; Yew et al., 2023).

What both partners can build together, within those honest parameters, is something real and worth building. Enough fluency in each other's attachment language that bids are recognized and repaired rather than accumulated into grievance. Enough understanding of each other's working models that conflict can be interpreted accurately rather than through the distorting lens of what each person's past has taught them to fear. Enough genuine responsiveness that the working model on each side begins to accumulate new evidence, not the evidence that all needs are met within the partnership alone, but the evidence that this person sees me, this person's care is real, and this relationship is a place where I am known (Bowlby, 1982; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2016; Reis et al., 2004).

Research on neurodiverse relationships consistently finds that partner responsiveness is one of the strongest predictors of satisfaction for both partners (Yew et al., 2023). But responsiveness built on an accurate understanding of what each person needs, including what the relationship can provide and what it cannot, is more durable than responsiveness built on accommodation alone (Reis et al., 2004; Reis & Gable, 2015; Yew et al., 2023). Whether that understanding leads toward a relationship rebuilt on clearer ground, or toward a decision to part with more clarity and less damage than might otherwise have been possible, it is still understanding. And understanding, in attachment terms, is always where something better begins (Bowlby, 1982; Kegan, 1982).

Building a Holding Environment for Both

Kegan described the holding environment as something that simultaneously confirms a person where they are and challenges them toward where they are going (Kegan, 1982). In neurodiverse relationships, building a genuine holding environment means understanding that both people have real and legitimate developmental needs, that those needs look different, and that meeting both simultaneously is genuinely complex (Kegan, 1982; Stafford et al., 2023). Sometimes it is possible, when both partners have enough understanding, enough support, and enough of what each nervous system requires, to build something that holds both people well enough (Kegan, 1982; Parker & Mosley, 2021; Yew et al., 2023). Sometimes it is not, and the most honest holding environment either person can offer the other is the clarity to see that, and the willingness to stop asking the relationship to carry what it cannot carry. Neither outcome is a measure of how much the people involved loved each other or tried. It is a measure of how significant the structural difference is, and how inadequately the world has prepared most neurodiverse couples to navigate it (Stafford et al., 2023; Strunz et al., 2017; Yew et al., 2023).

When both partners are working toward something together, what each needs is real and worth naming clearly. The non-autistic partner needs mutual reflection and the freedom to move through the natural oscillation of their developmental pathway, the forward movement and reconsideration, the moments of self-doubt and reorganization, that are the mechanism of their growth rather than evidence of weakness. They also need, in relationships where mutual reflection is structurally limited by neurological difference, other sources of that reflection: friendships, communities, therapeutic relationships, spaces where their perspective is met and reflected back in the ways their developmental pathway requires (Kegan, 1982; Reis et al., 2004). This is not a failure of the primary relationship. It is a structural necessity that the relationship, if it is to survive, needs to make room for rather than resist.

The autistic partner needs clear and explicit feedback, freedom from the requirement to camouflage as the price of closeness, and a relational environment that understands the horizontal surfaces of the autistic developmental pathway as necessary consolidation rather than failure or stagnation (Bradley et al., 2021; Cage & Troxell-Whitman, 2019; Pearson & Rose, 2021). They need to be known as they actually are, not as the masked version of themselves that years of conditional acceptance may have taught them to offer (Evans et al., 2024; Pearson & Rose, 2021). And they need a partner who can name what they need directly, because the ambient signals through which non-autistic distress is typically communicated may not be arriving in a form the autistic partner can easily receive (Jaswal & Akhtar, 2019; Milton, 2012; Stafford et al., 2023).

Both people need to feel that the relationship is safe enough to be honest in, that bids will be received even imperfectly, that repair is possible when misattunement happens, and that the fundamental question of attachment has a reliable enough answer to be worth staying for (Ainsworth et al., 1978; Bowlby, 1982; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2016).

When those conditions exist, or can be built, what becomes possible is something real. Not the erasure of difference, and not the demand that one developmental pathway perform like the other, but two people who understand enough about each other's working models, enough about each other's attachment languages, enough about what each other's nervous system actually needs, to keep answering the question (Milton, 2012; Parker & Mosley, 2021; Stafford et al., 2023). Two people whose maps, through the accumulated experience of being genuinely met, begin to revise themselves toward the territory they actually want to live in (Bowlby, 1982; Reis et al., 2004; Waters & Waters, 2006).

And when those conditions cannot be built, what understanding still makes possible is a clearer and less damaging ending than the alternative: two people who can name what happened without locating the failure entirely in each other, who can leave with more self-knowledge than they arrived with, and who can carry that knowledge into whatever comes next (Kegan, 1982; Stafford et al., 2023).

Both outcomes are real. Both deserve to be named. And in both, the goal was always the same: to be known, to be met, and to find in another person a world that answers back (Bowlby, 1982; Kegan, 1982; Reis et al., 2004).

This post concludes the series on Attachment. The next series is about Boundaries, exploring how autistic and non-autistic developmental pathways shape the formation, expression, and navigation of personal boundaries across the lifespan.


This is Series II — Attachment Across Neurologies: How Trust, Security, and Relationship Maps Form Differently

This was post 4.

1. The First Thing We Need: How Trust Forms Across Neurologies
2. The Shape of Security: What Attachment Looks Like Across Neurologies
3. The Map We Carry: How Attachment Experience Becomes the Working Model
4. When Two Maps Meet: Attachment in Neurodiverse Relationships

References

Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. N. (1978). Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the Strange Situation. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Bottema-Beutel, K., Kapp, S. K., Lester, J. N., Sasson, N. J., & Hand, B. N. (2021). Avoiding ableist language: Suggestions for autism researchers. Autism in Adulthood, 3(1), 18–29. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2020.0014

Bowlby, J. (1982). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment (2nd ed.). Basic Books. Original work published 1969.

Bradley, L., Shaw, R., Baron-Cohen, S., & Cassidy, S. (2021). Autistic adults’ experiences of camouflaging and its perceived impact on mental health. Autism in Adulthood, 3(4), 320–329. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2020.0071

Cage, E., & Troxell-Whitman, Z. (2019). Understanding the reasons, contexts and costs of camouflaging for autistic adults. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 49(5), 1899–1911. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-018-03878-x

Cossette-Côté, F., Bussières, E.-L., & Dubois-Comtois, K. (2022). The association between maternal sensitivity/availability and attachment in children with autism spectrum disorder: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Current Psychology, 41(11), 8236–8248. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02227-z

Crompton, C. J., Ropar, D., Evans-Williams, C. V. M., Flynn, E. G., & Fletcher-Watson, S. (2020). Autistic peer-to-peer information transfer is highly effective. Autism, 24(7), 1704–1712. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361320919286

Evans, J. A., Krumrei-Mancuso, E. J., & Rouse, S. V. (2024). Autistic masking in relation to mental health, interpersonal trauma, authenticity, and self-esteem. Autism in Adulthood, 6(2), 229–240. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2023.0051

Jaswal, V. K., & Akhtar, N. (2019). Being versus appearing socially uninterested: Challenging assumptions about social motivation in autism. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 42, Article e82. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X18001826

Kegan, R. (1982). The evolving self: Problem and process in human development. Harvard University Press.

Libster, N., Lopes, A., & Duvdevany, I. (2024). “I do my best to do right by her”: Autistic motherhood and the mother–daughter relationship. Autism in Adulthood. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2023.0106

Main, M., Kaplan, N., & Cassidy, J. (1985). Security in infancy, childhood, and adulthood: A move to the level of representation. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 50(1/2), 66–104. https://doi.org/10.2307/3333827

Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2016). Attachment in adulthood: Structure, dynamics, and change (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Milton, D. E. M. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The “double empathy problem.” Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2012.710008

Oppenheim, D., Koren-Karie, N., Dolev, S., & Yirmiya, N. (2009). Maternal insightfulness and resolution of the diagnosis are associated with secure attachment in preschoolers with autism spectrum disorders. Child Development, 80(2), 519–527. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2009.01276.x

Parker, M. L., & Mosley, M. A. (2021). Therapy outcomes for neurodiverse couples: Exploring a solution-focused approach. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 48(2), 407–423. https://doi.org/10.1111/jmft.12506

Pearson, A., & Rose, K. (2021). A conceptual analysis of autistic masking: Understanding the narrative of stigma and the illusion of choice. Autism in Adulthood, 3(1), 52–60. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2020.0043

Reis, H. T., Clark, M. S., & Holmes, J. G. (2004). Perceived partner responsiveness as an organizing construct in the study of intimacy and closeness. In D. J. Mashek & A. P. Aron (Eds.), Handbook of closeness and intimacy (pp. 201–225). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Reis, H. T., & Gable, S. L. (2015). Responsiveness. Current Opinion in Psychology, 1, 67–71. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2015.01.001

Rutgers, A. H., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., van IJzendoorn, M. H., & van Berckelaer-Onnes, I. A. (2004). Autism and attachment: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 45(6), 1123–1134. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.2004.t01-1-00305.x

Sasson, N. J., Faso, D. J., Nugent, J., Lovell, S., Kennedy, D. P., & Grossman, R. B. (2017). Neurotypical peers are less willing to interact with those with autism based on thin slice judgments. Scientific Reports, 7, Article 40700. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep40700

Stafford, A., Dutton, H., & Bertone, S. (2023). Relationship-counselling recommendations for partnerships involving autistic adults: A scoping review. Psychotherapy and Counselling Journal of Australia, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.59158/001c.77496

Strunz, S., Schermuck, C., Ballerstein, S., Ahlers, C. J., Dziobek, I., & Roepke, S. (2017). Romantic relationships and relationship satisfaction among adults with Asperger syndrome and high-functioning autism. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 73(1), 113–125. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.22319

Teague, S. J., Gray, K. M., Tonge, B. J., & Newman, L. K. (2017). Attachment in children with autism spectrum disorder: A systematic review. Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, 35, 35–50. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rasd.2016.12.002

Thom-Jones, S., Brownlow, C., & Abel, S. (2024). Experiences of autistic parents, from conception to raising adult children: A systematic review of the literature. Autism in Adulthood. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2024.0181

Waters, H. S., & Waters, E. (2006). The attachment working models concept: Among other things, we build script-like representations of secure base experiences. Attachment & Human Development, 8(3), 185–197. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616730600856016

Yew, R. Y., Hooley, M., & Stokes, M. A. (2023). Factors of relationship satisfaction for autistic and non-autistic partners in long-term relationships. Autism, 27(7), 2088–2103. https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613231160244